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September 14, 2010

Now I know that I usually only talk about really obscure videogames on here (my policy is "if it needs help...") but lately I've gotten hooked on a really good videogame that's already sold a ton of copies and likely made its developer a lot of money. I guess there's a time for everything. Monday Night Combat combines elements from Team Fortress, Defense of the Ancients, tower defense games, and the beloved Smash TV into a fast, thrilling and very addictive team third-person shooter.

Monday Night Combat is what it sounds like: the favorite, most heavily armed gladitorial sporting event of a bright, shiny, dystopian future. Smash TV is in the air here, from the official and antiseptic disregard for life (player characters appear to be clones) to the game-consuming obsession with piling up cash.

As soon as you start up the game, you're thrown straight into a tutorial. No way around it. Usually this is a suicidal move, but the tutorial is contextualized (the debut of a new pro) and it has you running around and blowing things up so fast that you don't even have time to complain.

Players can choose a class for their character: most of these are directly ripped from Team Fortress 2, and I suppose there's nobody better to steal from. The classes are so similar that I even won't bother talking about them. Money, which you get for making kills and collect around the map, can buy you upgrades for the character's abilities: the beginning of the multiplayer game is often a race to max out your character's abilities.

Single-player builds on the basics from the tutorial in a take-it-easy introduction to the real game that awaits in multiplayer modes: you defend a base (here it's a "moneyball" packed with sweet cash) from attacking waves of robots. There are several types, with their own quirks and gimmicks, and in multiplayer you'll eventually be able to make them work for you.

Around the arena are towers where you can build turrets. If you've played any tower defense game, you've already seen what these do: there's the weak, cheap turret that serves you well in the early stages but inevitably gets blown up, there's the heavy missile unit, there's the sniper tower, and the one that slows the approaching horde.

In mutiplayer, two six-player teams each have a Moneyball to protect. Rather than just fighting off robots, you're fighting off the other team (and the robots, which can be summoned with money and get very dangerous). This is the real game, where all the elements finally come together. Between character upgrades, towers, your team's robot troops, and various other powerups scattered around the map, you have to really think out your budget to do the most damage most efficiently. (I have a whole gameplan for this, but we'll talk about that some other time, or ask me on Formspring or something.)

I think games need to be smaller (even games that are already small, like the traditional 2D shooter), so Monday Night Combat suits me beautifully. A game is at longest only twenty minutes or so, and there's no dead time and a satisfying feeling of progression throughout. This is a slippery-slope kind of game where when you start losing, you start losing fast. There's room for comebacks and stalemates, but only a little bit. Nobody wants to be losing the same hopeless game for an hour (indeed, a lot of oversensitive players disconnect the moment things start to look bad for them), so the pace is really important in a game like this. Before you know it, you'll have lost two hours of your life.

I'm pretty miserable at FPS (this game's view is third-person, but it's not like the genre really changes), but it's good to have something like this around when the urge strikes me. I really don't need a big campaign mode or a vast narrative: all an FPS developer needs to do for me is make a good multiplayer game and I'm there.

September 10, 2010

Big news from the embattled Japanese arcade scene: led by Taito, a number of arcade developers are moving to an online distribution system for future titles. Rather than the old system-- buying a big ol' kit for every game-- arcade operators will buy new hardware that directly downloads the game (and any future updates) from Taito's servers. The first game to use this system is going to be Arc System Works' Blazblue: Continuum Shift II.

CSII is an odd case itself: right now, the home version of Continuum Shift is actually slightly ahead of the arcade one. There is a new character (Mu) and, of course, the DLC characters are still being worked on and will be released later. Rather than a completely new game, CSII will simply be an arcade release that contains all of the new home version content. From early impressions, it's also a major balance revision.

In a forward-thinking move from Arc that fighting game players have asked for for years, the console version of the game is explicitly built to accomodate patches. As it turns out, Arc was looking at doing the same thing with their arcade game all along. It makes sense that the people who made Sengoku Basara X and Hokuto no Ken (games with decent ideas that are nevertheless completely broken) would want to be able to patch their games. Ideally, arcade and home Blazblue will be up to date with each other.

Here's something totally weird, though: since it's digital distro, you'd expect costs to be a lot lower than if the operator had to ship in a case of Blazblue kits. Quite the opposite, friends! The cost of a CSII machine appears to be completely insane: I did the math, and all that money comes out to the equivalent of about $7,300 for a single cabinet (though no operator who buys this game will actually be running just one)! And then Arc's taking 31 yen for every play! I'm guessing a Blazblue kit was a grand or two? Complete madness.

Blazblue might be a big enough game to force operators' hands... but the last people who said that were Capcom with Street Fighter 4 and Sega with Virtua Fighter 5 before them. Neither did nearly so well in the arcades as expected.

So this is either a step forward for the Japanese arcade industry, or it's some kind of avaricious suicide. Perhaps it's both. Whatever may be, the implications of this whole deal reach home.

Recall, if you will, the few survivors in the Western arcade business. Basically dead as a cultural institution, the few remaining arcades here in America are almost exclusively for hardcore niche fans of fighters and music games and are run by the good, stubborn people who just want to keep the culture alive. Even more than the struggling Japanese operators, there's absolutely no way these places can make their money back on expensive machines. If the game is really major, like Street Fighter IV... then it's still going to be hard.

These guys are also getting increasingly screwed as home releases gain rapidly on the arcade versions. I don't believe for a second that my local spot would buy Continuum Shift II. Even at $1 a play, they'd simply never make their money back! So for the player outside of Japan, this probably just means no more arcade Blazblue.

Let's get into the land of Theory Fighter and wild speculation here. Say I was completely nuts and put up the price of a decent used car for a CSII setup (and let's say the Japanese company didn't say "we don't sell these outside Japan, sorry".). Would it even boot? I dunno. Online setups on Japanese arcade games are usually region-locked and will not work outside of Japan in the first place. Back in my Bemani days our IIDX operator bought a card reader and everything he needed to connect to Konami's e-amuse servers. E-amuse just wasn't having it, and so Beatmania just ran offline. Games like Virtua Fighter 5 (available only by lease from Sega) don't even run if they don't detect an internet connection from the right place.

Furthermore, Taito's always handled arcade distribution for Capcom with Street Fighter IV. Isn't it likely that the upcoming Super SF4 Arcade Edition (said to have more features, including Yun and Yang from SF3, even though it should really be Alex and Q because Yun is totally redundant with Rufus around) will be running on this system? Arcade operators running Super SF4 have had to migrate to hacked-up cabinets consisting of home consoles in boxes: now the arcade version of the game will actually exist, but it'll be completely impossible to afford. They'll just have to stick to the consoleboxes.

By the time I'm fabulously rich enough to be able to build my dream arcade, there won't be arcades anywhere anymore! Man!

September 02, 2010

I figured I wouldn't get too much into "how to play" stuff, because the post would be way too long, and it's kind of redundant with the volume of tutorials and guides out there online. Aksys has a good video guide up for Tsubaki anyway.

Lately, I switched up from Tsubaki to my old main, Litchi, in ranked matches. Tsubaki is a weak character for reasons we got into last time: her range is extremely short, her damage is poor, and she's faced with the choice of either constantly giving up the initiative or doing even less damage than she does normally.

Meanwhile, by many player measures, Litchi is the second best character in the game. (In case you were wondering, Bang is the strongest, and Ragna is below Litchi in the top three.) By contrast to Tsubaki, her range is very long: she fights with a big stick, after all. Litchi's damage is very (perhaps too) high, and she can get big damage from almost any distance. Her close-up rush isn't as versatile as Tsubaki's, but unlike Tsubaki she can actually cause serious damage every time she manages to get a hit in. Finally, if Litchi hits she will keep you pinned down, much more so than in the original game. She gains Heat really fast, and at the end of any combo, she's in a situation where the opponent is knocked down and she can use one of her super moves to keep them blocking as they get up. It's really ugly.

Being "strong" in a game like this is a matter of being the most efficient tool in the shed. On the extreme end, a character that can win in a single hit via some ridiculous, unaccounted-for combo is probably the strongest in their respective game. On the more extreme end, every character in the very broken Hokuto no Ken fighting game has a 100% combo. In that game, how good the character is isn't a matter of merely having such a combo, it's a matter of how easily and in how many ways the player is able to land it. As that game progressed, only one character appeared good, until all the players worked and worked and found out that while that guy was indeed the best, everybody else was just broken on different levels.

In games where you can't kill in a touch, it's still a matter of efficiency. You still want a character who can do the most damage the most easily. It's about fundamentals: one of the many reasons Bang is so good is that his simple standing jab is so damned strong. Often, characters who are too gimmicky, like Tsubaki, are inefficient as a result. Litchi's pretty gimmicky and complex herself, but she's got stronger fundamentals.

I started winning much, much more when I went to Litchi in ranked matches, and I haven't even put in the hours in practice mode to learn all her best combos yet. I put in a ton of work in with Tsubaki, but the amount of work a player puts in just can't overcome inherent character strength. I could get even better with Tsubaki and I wouldn't be as good as I was playing Litchi at about half of her potential. That's just the way it is.

September 01, 2010

I don't know if you guys realize that Viz's Haikasoru line of translated Japanese novels exists. Like most stuff in the US J-pop industry-- especially in the further reaches-- it's not like anyone can afford publicity anymore.

You know what you probably really don't know? One of the novels in this lineup, Slum Online, is about fighting games. Not only that, but the guy's been there. He actually knows what he's talking about. This book has been on my list since I read the excerpt, in which the author simply describes what any genre aficionado worth his Sanwa can tell you is a round of Virtua Fighter.

If you've read the book, you might wonder what the real-life analog to the game the protagonist is obsessed with is. I can say with certainty that the closest thing is VF: of the many talks about 3D fighting game arcana in the book, quite a few are specific to VF and no other game. Just saying!

Anyway, our narrator is a college freshman and an obsessive, high-ranking player of an online fighting game called Versus Town. Makes me feel a little nostalgic, except the game was Guilty Gear XX and I was only good enough at it to beat all my friends.

The part where the story actually crosses over into fantasy is when a beautiful honor student with a voice like an anime character (no, seriously) takes an interest in this guy. I don't mean a scientific interest (this one girl used to say to me "I'm fascinated by your lifestyle, Dave!"), I mean she runs up to this totally antisocial loner and says "HEY I'M LOOKING FOR A BLUE CAT WANNA GO OUT WITH ME?" The hero is living a double life as many gamers do: by night he seeks a mysterious, legendary player online, and by day he hangs out with his Magical Not-Girlfriend.

The former story is pretty dead-on accurate. The narrator covers, at least in passing, almost every phenomenon in the world of hardcore fighting gamers you can think of. From tier lists to gamers' dog-in-heat reactions when they find out a player is female to the catastrophic effects of differences in elevation on a juggle combo (it's why the ground is usually flat in fighting games), the author is all over the place and he's always essentially correct. You can tell the author's been there because he spends an entire chapter saying what anybody who's ever been addicted to an MMO will say to you after the point: "don't even start".

I wonder whether the fight scenes (and there are many) are exciting to someone who isn't genre-familiar: as someone who is, I can fully visualize every quick movement the players in Versus Town make. The descriptions read straight out into fighting game language. You probably wouldn't exactly be able to tell they're talking about movements in a game here, because it just reads like a fight. Reading these bits really made me miss VF. I wish people cared about that game.

As for the boy-meets-girl story... there's simply nothing going on there. The girl has no life of her own: at first we're presented with a quirky facade and immediately wonder what's beneath. Then the book ends and we realize that, hey, wait a second, that's all there was. She only exists so that the hero can be an indifferent not-boyfriend and realize, as a result of same, What Was Important All Along. I don't think she even spoke about anything that wasn't either the hero or a blue cat. When the guy has his revelation, it rings hollow. Somehow, these two managed to get through a 200-page novel together and fall in love (or at least the hero tells us he is: that the girl's in love is just assumed) without ever having a genuine, convincing interaction.

So yes, Slum Online is a true gamer book. It's thorough and very interesting when it's discussing the most arcane, insignificant details of the weird niche hobby it loves, and it's bad with girls to the point of outright incompetence.